Black and grey drawing of a deer skull with antlers wreathed in daisies, roses and vines on a white background, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Deer skull with antlers and flowers

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A deer skull with long antlers is drawn front-on in the centre of the image, with daisies, roses, buds, leaves and trailing vines growing across the antlers and skull. The linework is fine and detailed, with shading on the skull bone and solid black silhouettes for the antlers and leaves. The design is shown in black ink on a plain white background, with the composition balanced symmetrically.

Botanical Antler Flower Daisy Rose Leaves Vine Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The forest of Vellen Mar had not let a stag cross its boundary stones in nine winters, so when the old steward found hoofprints in the orchard snow, he sent you out alone with a lantern and a bread knife. The frost took your footprints as fast as you made them, and the lantern threw its light only as far as the first crooked hawthorn.

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The stag lay in the hollow beneath that hawthorn. It had been dead a long while. Its skull had bleached to the colour of old candle wax, and its long antlers were crowned with daisies and wild roses that should have been frozen black. Vines ran from the bone down into the moss and knotted themselves there, as if the forest had tried to hold the animal to the ground. Your grandmother used to say the kings of Vellen Mar buried what they could not keep, and that the forest always remembered where.

You knelt and loosened the first vine with your thumb. The petals were warm. A rose bud on the left antler opened as you lifted the skull, and the other vines let go one by one, sighing like rope through a pulley. Beneath the hollow, the frost had melted in a perfect ring, as though something had been waiting for the bone to be moved.

You carried it back to the orchard gate against your chest. By the time you reached the steward, the daisies had gone to seed and the roses had scattered their petals across the snow. He looked at the skull for a long moment, then at the apple trees behind him, which were already putting out blossom in the middle of winter. He said nothing. Neither did you. The path you had left behind was green.